(CNN) - Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, and Rep. James Clyburn, D-South Carolina, worked the phones all weekend, talking to Democratic lawmakers to try to gather support in their competition for the number two spot in the new House minority. Sources close to each insist to CNN their candidate will prevail.

“We will win,” said a senior Democratic source in the Hoyer camp, declining to speak on the record in order to talk about the internal process. “He [Hoyer] is racking up the votes. He knows how to do this because he has done this before,” said the source, referring to a bitter contest for House majority leader he ended up easily winning in 2006 against the late John Murtha.FULL POST

Washington (CNN) – A post-mortem Sunday of the mid-term elections provided little evidence that Democrats and Republicans will work together to address major issues such as deficit reduction any better than they have in recent years.

Republicans interviewed on talk shows promised congressional investigations, an all-out effort to repeal health care reform, and steadfast opposition to any form of higher taxes.
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(CNN) - Here are some of the most quotable sound bites from the Sunday morning shows:

On what the election results mean:

"I do think that many voters still remember being disappointed by Republican majorities. And I think this has not been a huge embrace of the Republican Party or the Republican brand. But it clearly was a repudiation of an agenda that's not working and agenda in which the government has overreached dramatically in many, many areas, and in which the spending has been wildly excessive." - Republican Sen.-elect Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, CNN's "State of the Union."

(CNN) – The man running for House majority leader from the Republican Party in the next Congress thinks Democrats don't get it.

"If Democratic members in the House elect Nancy Pelosi as their leader, it's almost as if they just didn't get the message from voters this election," Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia said on "Fox News Sunday." "The voters outright rejected the agenda that she's been about and here they're going to put her back in charge."FULL POST

(CNN) – The man in charge of electing House Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections endorsed House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi to continue as his party's leader and called Tuesday's election a "perfect storm" against Democrats.

"We saw a convergence of events that created a perfect storm against the Democrats," Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "What this was all about, and understandably so, was a referendum on 9.5 percent unemployment… We had not made enough progress."FULL POST